That seems weird to me, but libraries are mysterious beasts, so I might be expecting this behaviour?

Anyway dpkg claims this file is installed by libglib2.0-0, and the package hasn't had an upload since July 17th, so I can't believe this is the reason for the recent breakage (Even given that I don't logout often..)

Reinstalling both packages (metacity + libglib2.0-0) has failed to fix the problem so I'm lost.

Right now I'm running GNOME with a different window manager, icewm, via a ~/.gnome2/session file:

gnome-wm --default-wm /usr/bin/icewm-gnome --sm-client-id default0

This works almost perfectly - it is better than metacity in the sense that new windows don't overlap existing ones if there is spare screen space, but worse in that alt-TAB shows two windows "Top extended Edge Panel" and "Bottom Extended Edge Panel" - which I don't need/want to see.

I'd be happy to stay with IceWM if I could fix those two problems, but I'd love to know why metacity is broken, and how I can fix it. I can't see any obvious bug reports - and I'm not 100% certain that the gthread package is the source of the error...